It was one of those books you find on the bookshelf in a B&B. I started reading it, but didn’t get even halfway through before the rest of the family arrived and the reunion took precedence. It’s been about twenty years, and I still occasionally wonder what happened, and how it all ended.
I’m usually reminded of it when somebody mentions “The Andromeda Strain”. It was along the same lines, a plane load of people, in which at least one was quite ill, and turned out to have an extremely dangerous bug. The last I remember the plane had been parked on a sheet of ice, and there was talk of just pushing it under the freezing water. Just from the tone of it, I’d guess it was written in the late seventies; one of a bunch in that time period about scary contagious disease.
I want to say the illness was hemorrhagic in nature, but don’t really recall. It was probably by a fairly well-known author, but it wasn’t particularly well written. An arresting novel, but not “Literature.” There was exposition about the individuals on the plane, a doctor who I think was the first to get sick, a honeymooning couple, a veteran air hostess trying to keep the peace. . .
Doesn’t ring a bell, but if you want to read another good biomedical-emergency book, Richard Preston’s nonfiction The Hot Zone is very worthwhile. The movie Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman and Renee Russo is also pretty good.
Pandora’s clock. Written in 1995, but that just might be it. A copy is winging it’s way toward me from the Amazon warehouse, so we’ll soon know.
Thank you sooo much! I would have been 50 years from now on my death bed with my final words: “I do wish I’d found out what happened to the poor people on that plane!”
Well, I did give it another shot – my own research, and I found the book. Whoo me! But having read a couple of reviews of the book, I see I got some small details wrong that may have led folks astray.
Unknown or unremembered books can be found pretty easily through the Google Books search function if you can remember at least a few words that you can enter in the form of an exact quote. I found the name of a book whose title I’d been trying to remember for years just by entering “chrysalis on the underside of a branch of a tree”, which was the only exact line I could remember from the book. (I remembered it because I thought it was poorly written. Imagine my surprise to learn that the author has published five novels, won numerous awards and taught fiction writing at the university level. :eek:)
I thought the title sounded familiar, but not as a book. It turns out that it was made into a TV movie in 1996, with Richard Dean Anderson as the Captain.
